The Road to a Universal Mobile Web Experience

The Web is not going mobile; it is mobile. The time for experimentation is over and brands need to deliver a strategic mobile Web experience based on their customers’ behavior, user preferences and devices’ technical capability. Understanding where a user is, at what time of the day and what kind of device they are on gives a company unlimited delivery options to stand out from the competition and improve customer engagement. And the only way to solve that problem of “how do I stand out” is by testing out your company’s design approach and strategy across a Device Information Service – the key to solving infrastructure and architecture complexity with regard to the experience and features that consumer can only dream of using and interacting through with your brand.

Think about this scenario: Your customer comes across a free standing ad that your company has displayed in a high traffic area with a call to action to visit your site or engage with your branding campaign. Say that ad is in Times Square in New York City, and consider the volume of people that pass by that advert daily as well as the number of varied devices those people are carrying in order to interact. If you’re locking into only Android or Apple, and limiting share feature to just the camera and, say Instagram – how many people could you be missing out on that can be engaging with your brand regardless of the device they’re on let alone its feature set? The permutations of that are astounding when you consider translating lost opportunity to shear potential revenue lost.

Earlier this month, IDC forecasted that worldwide mobile Internet users will surpass PC Internet users by 2015. Now the question is: How can brands effectively reach out to these customers? I’ve listed out five steps that companies can take to develop a comprehensive and executable mobile strategy:

1. Research your customer. Did you know that 90% of consumers use multiple screens to complete a task over time? That increases the likelihood of your customers visiting your website on their tablets, smartphones and Web browsers at the same time. Find out how your customers are accessing your website, and set clear objectives for your mobile strategy.

2. How discoverable is your brand? What types of devices are being used the most to access your website? Your website should be built with that questions in mind – for example, devices with 4G capability still only take up 17.5% of the market share as of January 2013. Depending on the functionality of these devices, you can either build a more data-intensive mobile website or stick to a simpler one. As quoted by Joe Lalley, VP of Digital Products at Viacom, your goal is to “create experiences that make it easy to find and browse content regardless of the platform.”

3. Plan your user experience based on their needs, not yours. Users view 70% more pages per visit when browsing with a tablet compared to a smartphone. However, 74% of users will leave an unresponsive mobile website after 5 seconds. Try planning different user experiences based on standards such as device capabilities, user context and network connection. Netbiscuits’ Device Context Service facilitates this process by combining device and server-side information to provide the most accurate profile of the connecting device and thus enabling more targeted content to any device.

4. Look ahead to the future. With new phones announced and released every quarter, your mobile strategy should not only cater to current devices, but also the ones coming out three and six months from now. For example, a quick search on Google Play for “Web browser” will lead to a long list of results, including Google Chrome, Firefox and more – a list that continues to grow every day. The Web browser is still, and will continue to be, the most important vehicle to access and engage with customers. The next big task for web developers is to develop a mobile Web experience that works across multiple browsers, as well as other device-specific features like GPS and NFC

5. Evaluate. Fix. Repeat. Now that your new mobile page is up and running, keep an eye out on how your visitors are responding to your website. 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience, so it’s critical to refine user experience as user demographics change. Evaluate what is working and what is not working, then analyze data to bolster your mobile Web strategy.

Whose job is it to get this done? The whitepaper produced by Netbiscuits and IDC found that less than 5% of global firms currently have an official and centralized internal mobile department. To build and maintain an effective mobile Web experience that successfully drives traffic and revenue, it’s important to establish an internal Mobility Center of Excellence that could build and execute a mobile Web strategy.

Netbiscuits is committed to delivering a consistent browsing experience by developing new solutions for brands, such as the recent Device Context Service. We believe that the ability to recognize device-specific capabilities and catering to each user’s needs is key to building a universal Web strategy. The mobile space is becoming more diverse and crowded than ever. It’s time for brands to embrace mobile and provide a seamless mobile Web experience that customers deserve.

Daniel Weisbeck joined Netbiscuits in 2012 as CMO, and is responsible for overall marketing and product strategy as well as execution.